


credo ut intelligam

by girl_wonder



Category: Supernatural
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-28
Updated: 2011-05-28
Packaged: 2017-10-19 20:42:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/205006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girl_wonder/pseuds/girl_wonder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean and language before and after Sam. The Latin fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	credo ut intelligam

The first thing he learned was that verbs, in Latin, change form with their meaning. The book called it conjugation. Conjugate the verb.

"You're doing what?" Sam asked.

"Conjoogating," Dean said shortly, his pen still hovering over the blank sheet of paper.

"You mean you're _conjuhgating_ verbs?" Sam emphasized the mispronunciation, his smile quirked like he was waiting for the punch line.

The paper still wouldn't make sense of the charts he had copied out of Sam's battered old textbook. Dean crumpled it in his hands and threw it at Sam's head, before shoving away from the table. It was wooden and had come with the house; Dean hoped he hadn't broken it or his dad would get on his case about security deposits.

*****

Dean found the textbook while he was waiting for Dad, stuck in the house because the new muffler for the Impala wasn't due in for a week. Sam was in school then, his classes and mind structured around the goal of college normalcy. He obviously thought that Dean didn't know about the letters of acceptance lining the inside of his closet door, but Dean did.

The letters all had different seals at the top of them. Harvard. Stanford. Berkeley. Dean ran his fingers down their neat, neat rows and angrily kicked one of the many piles of books on the floor. The bottom book stayed where it was, solid, and he bent down to pick it up so he could throw it into the fucking trash because that was where all of Sam's stuff was going to go when he left and Dad and Dean could move freely again.

It was Sam's old Latin textbook from freshman year when Dad had told him that if he was going to take a language he should at least take a useful one. _Reading Latin: grammar, vocabulary and exercises_. The book was one of the infinite things between Dean and Sam now.

Dean took it into the kitchen instead and sat down with a cup of coffee.

*****

When he went back a few days after Sam had found him out, Latin verbs still changed more than English ones did. Their meaning shifted with subject, conjugating into differences he didn't notice in English. Dean said the pattern of phrases in his mouth a few times.

To fight. I fight, you fight, he/she/it fights, we fight, you fight, they fight.

 _pugnare. pugno, pugnas, pugnat, pugnamus, pugnatis, pugnant._

Dean liked that when he said 'I fight' he didn't need to have a pronoun in Latin. He could use one word and that would mean that he was Dean and he was fighting. I fight. _pugno._

*****

After too many confusing sentences, he figured out that it was easier to read sentences when the third person verb had nouns attached.

 _Dad/Sam/Demon pugnat. Dad and Sam pugnant._

The changes made to verbs were easy in Dean's head. He chopped off the end and added new endings that carried meaning. It was simple.

Only, as if in retaliation for his ability to _get_ verbs, nouns were infinitely more complicated. Nouns didn't stay the same, the way they did in English. Under his fingertip, they shifted to new endings and each ending had its own meaning except that the endings were sometimes the same and sometimes different unlike verbs where the endings (suffix, he thought forcefully. The _suffix_ ) were pretty predictable.

Changing nouns was not like declining verbs for him, because he spent a lot of time writing down the words he didn't understand and looking them up in the dictionary that was twice as used as the text. Most of the words he wrote down were nouns.

Nouns, on their own, declined. He knew how to pronounce that word, thank you very much, because sometimes when he asked out the rich princess of a new school she would decline his invitation to dinner and accept his invitation to make out in the back of his Impala.

Unlike women, who seemed charmed when he forgot things because they were around, nouns were not forgiving. There were six cases and he tasted them as he declined nouns. They all meant different, multiple things and the only easy one was the one which was easiest to learn.

Nominative equaled subject. As practice, for a while Dean wrote only himself as the subject of sentences; it was weird not beginning all sentences with, 'Sam and I.' 'Sam and I' couldn't end with an '-o', they ended with an infinitely more confusing '-mus' two extra letters and sometimes a changed vowel in between the first part (root, he said out loud) and the ending.

Sam always changed every other ending in Dean's life, but here Dean could control what part Sam altered. In one word, he could make all of his sentences about Dean instead of about 'Dean and Sam.' With one suffix, Dean could cut Sam out of all of his stories.

*****

During the three weeks it took for the new muffler to come in through the mail, Dean would hide the book whenever Sam came home. He wasn't ashamed of it, he wasn't really ashamed of anything he'd ever done from the first time he kissed a girl on the playground to the last time he'd stuck a silver knife in between a shape shifter's ribs.

But he'd never been one to show off and that's what this would look like to Sam. Or worse, Sam would try to pity him, maybe offer to help him out with the exercises, and then Dean would have to punch him in the face and throw away the book.

I throw away the book. _abjico librum._

He would have the muted television on and shove his book under the last Playboy issue he bought as soon as he heard Sam's key in the door. Dean was not embarrassed ( _erubescere_ ), but he couldn't exactly look his brother in the eye about this one either.

*****

Later, after Sam left Dean and Dad and after the house was rented to another family living just this side of dirt poor, Dean would conjugate verbs while driving long stretches of road on his own. To fight. To die. To love.

He learned early on that 'to love' conjugated easily. _amare_ : to love. _amo_ : I love. _amas_ : you love. _amat_ : Sam loves. _amamus_ : we love. _amatis_ : you love. _amant_ : Dad and Sam love.

When he forgot how verbs conjugated he let the variations of _amare_ flow through, quickly saying them out loud out of habit. _amoamasamatamamusamatisamant._ It was better than talking to himself or listening to the trucker's radio on the passenger seat, lewd jokes crackling over the common frequencies.

In English he just said, "love," when Sam was leaving, already out the door, bags packed and he was never coming back because of Dad or maybe because of him. In English, 'love' meant 'I love, you love, we love' without Dean having to specify which one he meant.

Winchester men were English verbs, unchanging yet multiple in their meanings.

*****

If Dean was a noun, he would be a Latin noun, he would shuttle off each part of himself into a different ending, so that when he smiled a certain way he would mean one thing and when he lied to people it would be ok because the other four declinations of him weren't liars at all.

Five declinations and he began reciting those along the beat of a Pixie's song. Nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative.

Nominative: subject. Accusative: direct object. Genitive: of the noun (my car, he said out loud on the road. The car of me.) Dative: to or for the noun. Ablative he didn't get yet, but the book said 'by, with, from, in' like that was supposed to make more sense than it did.

After a while the first two declensions rolled off his tongue as easily as verbs did. He liked watching nouns trip over themselves to be specific in their meaning while leaving enough room for him to choose the meaning he liked best.

The first declension was feminine, because that's the other thing about Latin nouns, they all had a sex attached to them. Gender, his book called it, but he called it sex like the female and the male nouns were going to get together and make adjectives or something.

 _femina, -ae_ meant first declension. It meant _femina, feminam, feminae, feminae, femina._ Then he had to turn around and write the plural differently so he moved his hand over a bit and started again: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, ablative. _feminae, feminas, feminarum, feminis, feminis._

In English, it just meant 'woman' and so when he saw a hot chick standing at a crosswalk, he thought 'woman' and the back of his mind whispered _'femina'_ like his sophomore English teacher used to whisper the correct pronunciation for words he didn't know when she made him read out loud in class.

*****

By the time that Sam came back, Dean had almost given up on trying to learn Latin. Eventually, he'd run past the point in the book that Sam had used in school and the smudged pencil writing had disappeared over a single section.

At first, Dean had been stubborn, wanting to finish it on his own, wanting to pretend he didn't trace over the hints Sam had written to himself. But reality had set in and it had grown too tiring to kill something and then come back to the motel room, car, bus stop, jail cell, one-night-stand's apartment and try to decipher something in a language that even Sam had given up on.

So, Sam came back and found the book, cover bent backwards from being underneath a box of garlic cloves for the past few months. He pulled it out, smiled. He said, "You kept this?"

Opening to the first page he traced his name, Sam Winchester, written in black ballpoint ink. Dean had put his finger on that spot every single time he had opened the book.

"It's got a dictionary in back," Dean said in explanation.

When he looked back at Sam, Sam had unfolded a piece of notebook paper and was staring attentively at it. Even without seeing the details, Dean recognized it as one of his final attempts at translating the practice passage.

"You aren't matching the adjectives with the nouns," Sam said quietly.

The thing about adjectives and nouns, Dean remembered suddenly, was that they had to match in every way possible. They had to be the same sex, the same case and the same number. Sometimes it got irritating trying to match them up, because sometimes they just didn't find each other. Or they did and it didn't make sense.

Adjectives sometimes didn't need nouns, too. Sometimes they implied an object, leaving the real nouns in the sentence on their own.

Grabbing the sheet from Sam, Dean clumsily crumpled it with one hand and tossed it out the window. "It was just something to pass the time," he said.


End file.
